----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ulf Lamping" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Developer support list for Wireshark" <[email protected]>
Sent: Friday, January 18, 2008 2:41 AM
Subject: Re: [Wireshark-dev] pcap-ng support


> Gianluca Varenni schrieb:
>> What doesn't work:
>> - timestamps are wrong. There are two problems here:
>>  1. the IDB option for the timestamp precision is not decoded, and I
>> was generating timestamps with nanosecond precision.
>>  2. timestamps are not in the libpcap fashion (seconds and
>> microseconds, or seconds and nanoseconds). It's a single 64bit
>> quantity that is split into high and low 32bits.
> Well, I've implemented the first IDB options now in SVN *24133*,
> if_tsaccur (only values 6 and 9 for now) and if_fcslen. So both
> timestamps and FCS should work ok now.
>
> FCS indeed looks ok, but the timestamps are still odd in icmp2.ntar.
>
> According to
> http://www.winpcap.org/ntar/draft/PCAP-DumpFileFormat.html#sectionpb,
> the timestamp isn't a 64bit quantity, but the usual pcap way of 32bit
> seconds from 1/1/1970 and 32 bits fractional second.
>
> Do I miss something here?

I think the description of timestamp formats is quite bad in the specs.
The timestamps are represented as a 64bit quantity split into high and low 
32 bits, that represent the number of microseconds/nanoseconds/??? from 
1/1/1970 (that's the meaning of in "in standard unix format i.e. since 
1/1/1970").
The reason behind using a single 64bit quantity instead of 
seconds/subseconds is twofold:
1. if we use seconds and subseconds, 32bits don't allow to go under the 
nanosecond.
2. several hardware-based capture cards represent timestamps as 
nanoseconds/microseconds as a single 64bit quantity i.e. they don't split 
them into seconds and subseconds.

BTW, there was a discussion on the timestamp format on the ntar-workers 
mailing list, here

http://www.winpcap.org/pipermail/ntar-workers/2006-March/000122.html


>
> Regards, ULFL
>
> P.S. AFAIK (I'm not a native english speaker), if_tsaccur is actually
> the resolution and not the accuracy (as the name implies) nor the
> precision (as the text of is_tsaccur implies). Should we change the name
> of if_tsaccur to if_tsresol in the spec? Otherwise if we want to add a
> accuracy / precision option later (which I think we'll going to need),
> these names could get pretty confusing!

I'm not a native english speaker either, but you are probably right. Anyone 
with different thoughts about it?
This change is a breaking change in the NTAR API, but it's ok.

Have a nice day
GV


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